. It has ever been a hobby of mine, though perhaps it is a truism, not a hobby, that the true life of a man is in his letters. Not only for the interest of a biography, but for arriving at the inside of things, the publication of letters is the true method. Biographers varnish, they assign motives, they conjecture feelings, they interpret Lord Burleigh's nods; but contemporary letters are facts.-DR. NEWMAN, TO HIS SISTER, MRS. JOHN Mozley, MAY 18, 1863. |